News

WWDC 2011 Keynote play-by-play transcript now available

By Jeremy Horwitz ● Monday, June 6, 2011

We’ve just posted the full chronological transcript of our play-by-play from the WWDC 2011 Keynote. If you haven’t seen the separate news stories yet, today’s big announcements pertained to the fall 2011 releases of iOS 5 and Apple’s new free wireless synchronization service iCloud, as well as the July 2011 release of Mac OS Lion. Click on the title of this article for the full transcript, and visit our Flickr photostream for live photos from the event.

8:52 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. Members of the media are now congregating outside of the Moscone West auditorium where the Keynote will be taking place; there are a collection of banners heralding iOS 5, iCloud, and Mac OS X Lion, with two banners now conspicuously shrouded in black. Please continue to check our Flickr photostream for live photos from the event.

8:58 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. The two covered banners are the only two on the top floor where media are gathered; below are the banners for Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud. See the scene here.

9:25 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. Last-minute rumors before the event begins continue to iterate upon previous claims of a new notifications system for iOS, with various depictions of a top-of-screen replacement for the traditional iOS status bar that contains text notifications and an icon indicating what app they’re coming from. All of the rumors agree that this is the form notfications will now take, but various mocked-up screenshots diverge on the specifics of how it will look.

9:31 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. iLounge’s editors are currently taking bets on the pricing structure for Lion. All of us agree that it will be offered as an App Store download, and probably in a physical boxed form at a higher price. Price estimates range from $29 to $99, with most of us guessing that it’ll fall into the $29 to $49 range as a download, with a $49 to $69 in-store price. Check out our new Mac.iLounge.com / iLounge + Mac site for updates on today’s Mac-related announcements!

9:35 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. People are now being allowed into the auditorium. Guesses as to what’s behind the covered banners: date and price announcements for Lion, a revised MacBook Air, or a price drop for iPhone 4. Unlikely but possible: new names or details for revised Time Capsule + AirPort routers.

9:43 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. Nothing special’s on stage that can be seen at the moment - typical Apple logo on a screen, with a couple of computers set up. Ray Charles’ What I’d Say is playing. Lead Apple designer Jony Ive is in the front row, walking around in front of the stage.

9:52 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. The Guardian reports on a pre-show tweet: “If I’m correct, the One More Thing will be a live performance of a real Lion devouring the Lodsys team.” Knock on Wood by Eddie Floyd now playing.

9:56 AM PT: The Keynote starts at 10:00AM Pacific Time. Apple has asked for all electronic devices to switch to silent mode. The music has stopped. Oh wait, there’s James Brown’s I Feel Good.

10:01 AM PT: Rapturous applause for Jobs as he takes the stage. Plenty of whistling - WWDC banner’s on the screen as an introduction.

10:02 AM PT: Over 5,200 attendees here today, sold out in 2 hours. This is the biggest place we can get to have this. Wish we could sell more tickets but don’t know where to hold the event. Over 120 sessions, 100 hands-on labs, 1000 Apple engineers on site.

10:03 AM PT: Three things today. We’re going to talk about software, Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud. Start with Lion. Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi will demo Lion. Craig is VP of OS X Software, Phil is Senior VP of WW Product Marketing. First product is all about the Mac. “Mac is kicking ass,” Phil notes; 54,000,000 active Mac users around the world. Mac has grown every quarter. Customers, press, analysts all saying wonderful things. Mac up 28%, PC down 10% this year.

10:06 AM PT: Mac has evolved a lot over the last 10 years. Where does it go next? Lion. Major release with 250 new features. 10 features to talk about today. (1) Multitouch gestures. Mac ushered in the GUI, but now there are multi-touch trackpads. Lion can count on it from the beginning, with momentum scrolling, pinch to zoom, etc. Swipe through photos, etc. Persistent scrollbars aren’t needed any more. (2) Full-screen apps. Take advantage of every pixel on the display. Lion has a standard method to do this so that developers and users know how it will work, with a one-tap button to use the full screen or not. You can now have more than one full-screen app at a time and skip between them.

10:09 AM PT: Examples of many full-screen apps. (3) Mission Control. This for many will be the best feature of Lion. Apple developed Dashboard, Expose, etc but they didn’t work together. Now Mission Control gives a birds-eye view of everything in the system. A demo of Mission Control from Craig. Remove the need for scrollbars, use tricks such as zooming in and out with fingers, smart-zooming in with two fingers, etc. Navigate in Safari—use two finger swipes to change pages, which slide to the right as you swipe backwards. Full-screen apps such as iPhoto. Three fingers bring you back to the desktop. Dashboard now is off to the left of the desktop as its own space, like Spotlight on iOS.

10:14 AM PT: Photo Booth, now with new effects, including bulging eyes, confused birds flying in a circle over the head, and other head-tracking effects. Swipe with three fingers up on the trackpad to switch to Mission Control, which lets you see everything that’s going on and move to or preview different apps. Easy to create new spaces. End of demo.

10:17 AM PT: (4) Mac App Store. The best place to purchase and discover new software applications. There have been many channels to get software—drive to a store, or wait for mail order. Now, you can get software directly from the computer. In the last 6 months, App is now the #1 software channel for PC software. Developers have been successful - Autodesk has a million new users. Doubling of overall revenue for small developers, quadrupling for some. Pixelmator made a million dollars in first 20 days. Now it’s built into Lion, with in-app purchases, push notifications, sandboxing, and delta updates. Downloads will be faster. (5) Launchpad.

10:19 AM PT: (5) Launchpad lets you launch with a single gesture. Pinch lets you bring up all of your apps in an iOS-style window. (6) Resume. This lets you get back to your prior application state even after a quit. Remembers which documents that were open, text that was selected, window positions, etc. It works system-wide. It will pick up exactly where you left off across the entire system. There’s a new Login window, too. (7) Auto-Save. Previously you had to save, save, save while working. The computer takes over here to help. Name of document is now a menu you can tap on. Browse previous versions, revert to last opened, lock in changes, duplicate the file directly from the title bar. (8) Versions.

10:24 AM PT: (8) As auto-save saves your document, Versions preserves multiple versions as you’re working. It’s automatic, but you can create manual snapshots, efficient storage - only the current version is shared when sending/copying. Time Machine-style interface, with multiple versions of documents. They’re demonstrating the last cluster of features. No need for a prompt when quitting applications any more. Resume just re-opens the document, exactly where you left off, complete with the highlighted text from the last version.

10:28 AM PT: Lots of photos on our Flickr page!

10:29 AM PT: Craig is done. Number 9: transferring documents between computers. AirDrop. Simple transferring system. New Finder UI that shows avatars of users on nearby Macs. Drag-and-drop. (10) New Mail. It’s derived from the iPad. Favorites bar at the top, too. Searching—there are search suggestions. Start to type what you’re looking for, and Mail recognizes people and subjects to prompt you. Tokens let you tag as “from, to, subject” and so on. A Gmail-style conversation view. Gets difficult to follow multiple conversations in a thread. Conversation view now takes out the multi-layered stuff and puts them in as a stream of individual messages.

10:32 AM PT: Demo of Lion Mail. A full-height message list on the side with snippets, like the iPad. Type in “Ph” and up pop people who match, like Phil Schiller. Conversations provides a beautiful view - all messages sent in the conversation appear just as they were sent. All of the extra headers are removed. File a conversation by dragging it to a folder in Favorites. End of demo.

10:35 AM PT: List of all of the features, including File Vault 2, FaceTime now built-in, Server all new with Lion. How to get Lion? In past, was on optical disc. Now ONLY in the Mac App Store. Easiest upgrade ever. 4GB download. Same size as single HD movie. (A long one.) Right in place installation - no need to reboot from optical disc. You can use on all of your personal Macs. Price? $29. Lots of applause on that. Developer preview today, customers can get it in July. iOS 5 is next.

10:38 AM PT: Scott Forstall on stage. SVP of iOS Software. 200 million iOS devices - #1 mobile operating system. 44% market share. Android is at 28%, RIM 19%, other 9%. Latest addition was iPad 2. Lineups in NYC, etc. 25 million iPads sold in first 14 months. Lots of stores for iOS, including iTunes Music Stores, 15 billion songs plus sold on iTunes. #1 music store. Next is iBookstore. Launched a little over a year ago, 6 major publishers in store, 130m books sold. App Store: 425,000 apps. 90,000 were specifically for iPad. Size is hard to fathom. 14 billion apps downloaded in less than three years. Devs have received $2.5b so far as a reward. Every genre imaginable is covered. Travel apps, games, entertainment like HBO Go, etc. Deep apps for CT scans, FAA approved flight apps, etc. Business apps like WebEx for multi-party video conferencing. 225 million accts across the three stores, all with credit cards and one-click purchasing. Makes it easy for customers to buy. So future of iOS - 5.

10:43 AM PT: Major release. 1500 new APIs and 200 new features for users. 10 of them: (1) Notifications. Tons of applause. Looks like an app icon. Old way was jarring with a pop-up. Alerts, pop-ups, badges were very popular. 100b push notifications were made. But a better UI would be preferable. They interrupt you. You need to deal with them before they move on. New solution is Notification Center. It handles all notifications from everywhere. Any time, anywhere, you swipe down. Just like Android. Prettier version. Missed calls, voicemails, texts, scoring alerts, Facebook updates, Twitter, all notifications, stocks and weather all together. Notifications no longer interrupt. In a game, you see a nice animation that dismisses itself after a few seconds, or you can tap to switch apps. Improved lock screen - more info with notifications, icons, dates, and times. Smoked UI similar to the lock, blends in. iOS 5 phone has four notifications in demo: SMS, Facebook, Missed Call, sports score. Swipe across any of them and you go right into the correct app. Stocks scroll across the top, weather below, notfications below that. Pictures on Flickr. (2) Newsstand with Subscriptions.

10:49 AM PT: A place for magazines. A single place that combines all of your magazines so they can be located from one place automatically—a cross between iBooks and an iOS folder. Background downloads new issues automatically whether you open app or not. The cover is the front page of the new newspaper or magazine. (3) is Twitter. One billion tweets per week. Make it easier to use Twitter, so single sign-on across all apps. Credentials stored for all apps. Integrated into many apps. You can tweet out all sorts of content, camera photos directly from the app, add location optionally, enter text and hit send. You can tweet articles from Safari, videos from YouTube, tweet about businesses or locations from Maps. Integrates with contacts to pull Twitter photos and update contacts. (4) Safari. Almost 2/3 of all mobile browsing done with Safari. It’s even the basis of all web browsing on Android. Safari Reader on iOS. Gets rid of all the distractions and lets you focus on text, just as on Mac; single-scrolling page of text. You can also e-mail the content of a story rather than just the link.

10:54 AM PT: Easy way to read pages later. You can create a Reading List that saves stories to read later. Synced across all iOS devices, Mac (Lion) and Windows (Safari). Mark for read on iPhone, finish on iPad. Next: Tabbed Browsing. Looks like on Mac, VERY fast switching between windows. Demoed on the iPad. Check out our Flickr photos (linked at top of page). Safari demo shows how 20-page review can be accessed in Reader, one scroll across all 20 pages; add to Reading List to access on other devices. Twitter integration lets you tweet from Safari, hit send.

10:57 AM PT: (5) Reminders. People create lists of things to do, buy, etc. This should be integrated into the OS. Some have places associated, some have a time, get rid of scraps of paper and store it all on the phone. You can store multiple lists, date lists, assign locations, sync with iCal, will set up reminders when you leave an area. Works with Exchange/Outlook. (6) Camera. iPhone 4 has one of the best cameras on a mobile phone. Also one of the most popular. It’s one of the most popular cameras of any kind on Flickr. It surpasses the Canon 5D and Rebel XSi. Camera is faster so you can get in and take photos. Lock screen shortcut. Double-click home button on lock screen. You can go straight to camera to right of slider with a button. Volume up button now can snap photos, too. (Lots of applause.) Optional grid lines. Pinch to zoom in camera. Hold finger over part of a scene to set auto-exposure and auto-focus lock. Options menu now appears where HDR button was before. Crop and rotate. Red-eye reduction. One-click enhance from iPhoto has been brought over to iPhone. Great editing features added.

11:04 AM PT: (7) Mail. Mail is one of the most used apps on the devices. Improved for iOS 5. Rich text formatting, bold italic underline, indentation. Draggable addresses between To/Cc/BCC. Flag messages. Full-text search. Entire message content can be searched, swipe to Inbox gesture on the iPad. Lets you hide/show the pane. More enterprise support for encrypted mail.

11:04 AM PT: Demo time. Dictionary from iBooks works everywhere now, built into iOS as a service. It can define words within Mail. Reply all - drag an address from CC to BCC.

11:06 AM PT: New split screen keyboard for iPad—use thumbs on both sides of the screen. You can even drag keyboard up and down the screen. (8) PC Free. Cut the cable. People are going crazy. Apple says its built the incredible devices, but they’re ready to make the post-PC hurdle. What is “Connect to iTunes” doing there? People want to use iPads as their only device - why a computer? So iOS 5 does this. Now there’s a Welcome screen with slide to set up. Software updates OTA. Activate and set up right out of the box. Delta updates as well. Smaller packages with only the changes inside, so you needn’t download huge files. Apple looked at all the reasons people went back to their computers and added them to iOS. Create and Delete calendars directly from iOS. Photo editing functionality. No computer required for basic edits. Create/delete mailboxes from iOS. (9) Game Center.

11:10 AM PT: (9) Game Center. iOS is the most popular gaming platform on the planet. Over 100,000 game and entertainment titles. 50 million Game Center users in just 9 months. Xbox Live took 8 years to get 30 million. Now you’ll have photos for avatars. Achievement points. Friends of friends. Recommendations from friends. Game discovery/recommendations. Turn-based game support from within Game Center. Game downloads directly from Game Center without need to visit App Store. (10) iMessage. Text messages, multimedia messages are handled in iPhone app Messages. What about iPod / iPad? Message solution across all iOS 5 devices. If you want to send messages to these devices, they all go through iMessage. Text, photo, video, contacts, group messages. Plus delivery receipts, read receipts, typing indication so you can see when typing is happening. This is like Blackberry Messager for iOS. Pushed to all devices simultaneously. Start convo on one device, pick up on another. Works over 3G and Wi-Fi. Everything’s encrypted. Greg Joswiak up to demo iMessage. Joz is playing Cut the Rope on iPhone. Forstall launches iMessage, types a message. Notification shows up as game is being played, right at the top of the screen, just there - doesn’t interrupt. Slides down notification area, sees message, taps on it, and it opens to convo view. As he types, iChat balloon appears on Forstall’s device. Joz gets delivery confirmation. Forstall taps, Joz sees receipt showing date and time read.

11:16 AM PT: That’s it for the demo. It’s all built on push notification system so Apple knows how to scale it over time. Those are just 10 of the 200 new features for users. AirPlay mirroring so you can mirror AirPlay to TV wirelessly. Wi-fi sync to itunes. (Huge applause.) New iPad music app, iTunes Tone Store, Personal Dictionary, Multitasking gestures, FaceTime mid-call invite alerts, improved FaceTime video quality, optional to speak text selection, Smart Playlist sync from iTunes, Mail improved offline support, Newsstand Kit, GL Kit, Storyboarding, fast forward and rewind streaming content, core image framework from OS X. Access LED flash, improved PDF support, OpenGL. Developer seed TODAY. Customers “this fall.” Will support same devices as iOS 4.3. 3GS/4 iPhone, all iPads, 3G/4G iPod touch. And, uh, new iPhones and iPod touches, presumably. Steve is back for third thing.

11:20 AM PT: iCloud is Steve Jobs’ discussion. Working on it for some time. 10 years ago, we had one of four most important insights. PC was going to be the digital hub for digital life. Camcorders. Music. Photos. Where else were you going to put it? Now, devices have changed. They all have wireless capabilities. Yet you have to keep going back to sync from a central device and with all the devices, it’s a pain. Now the content is going to be in the cloud. Everything will be in sync without you having to think about it. People think about it today as an active process where they have to send stuff back and forth. It can be made automatic. Nothing new to learn for the user. iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices. Automatically uploads it, stores it, and pushes it. Completely integrated with your apps.

11:24 AM PT: Jobs says—but they brought me MobileMe, why should I believe that it just works? (laughter) Apple has thrown away the prior MobileMe stuff and rewritten the core apps to be iCloud apps. Now they’re on all the devices. Contacts: make a new contact on iPhone and it’s pushed up to the cloud, stored there, pushed to other devices. Any change on one device goes to all devices without effort. Calendars, too. Calendar sharing has been added. Share calendars with wife, changes get updated on wife’s iPhone, too. New appointment added, it goes to the cloud and back. Mail account is at @me.com. New messages push to all devices. Inbox + folders are up to date on all devices. iCloud is free. App Store syncs to push apps to all devices. No charge. Cloud icon appears besides purchased apps in purchase history. Buy device in future and cloud downloads the apps to all of your devices automatically. iBooks sync via iCloud. Read position synced.

11:30 AM PT: Backup has changed. We’re talking about being PC free. Backups to the cloud, if you want to be completely PC free. Replace your phone, type Apple ID, everything gets downloaded from the iCloud. Daily auto-backups to iCloud over Wi-Fi. Backup camera roll with photos, videos, device settings, app data, all automatic, daily, wireless. Three other apps that come with iCloud. Most inventive part: Documents in the iCloud. Pages document on iPad syncs to iCloud, auto-uploads, syncs to Pages on other devices. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote versions last week support this. Roger Rosner, VP of iWork is now going to demo.

11:33 AM PT: iWork apps went universal last week for iPod and iPhone. Now when you fire up Keynote, you’ll be asked with prompt re: iCloud. Click yes and everything in cloud downloads and appears on the device. Even remembers position in document. No effort required to get the files. You’re in and out of documents in a flash. Make changes on the iPhone, open iPad, and document is already there, updated. Steve’s back. Documents in cloud really complete the iOS document storage story, too. Apple’s been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system. So user wouldn’t have to worry about it. Teaching someone how to use the Mac has been held up by this file system - hunting for files. On iOS, you don’t have to think about it. It solves how you move documents between devices. Apps can store documents in the iCloud and get them pushed to all devices, update on all when changed on any. Developers will have APIs to tie into this. It can sync key/value data, complex docs, or more. Works with Macs + PCs too. NEXT THING: His favorite one - Photo Stream.

11:38 AM PT: Photo Stream: Making it easier to get photos on iPhone onto the iPad etc. Photostream unifies photos across multiple devices. Take photos on any device and appears on all devices’ camera rolls, including a Mac. Photos are on iPad waiting for me when I get home. Auto-import into things like iPhoto on the Mac, push from iPhoto auto to the iCloud to other devices. It’s a new album (cloud-based) on iOS, and built into iPhoto for Mac. On a PC, the Pictures folder is used for this. It’s integrated into Apple TV too, within Internet menu.

11:40 AM PT: Media will use up a lot of memory on devices… it also consumes a lot of storage. So Apple will wirelessly iCloud store the last 1000 photos for your devices. Anything you want to keep permanently, just move it into an album. Everything will store on Mac or PC. Apple will keep on server for 30 days, more than enough time to grab. Eddy Cue, VP of Internet Services, coming out to demo. Launches camera app on iPhone, snaps picture of a toy from Cars. The photos are on the iPhone. Now it’s also on the iPad in the Photo Stream. No new skill for users to learn. Save permanently on iPad by creating a new album directly on the iPad. Now look at Mac where iPhoto’s running. Photo Stream has the photos there too. Jobs is back.

11:44 AM PT: Photos you take or import upload to iCloud. Pushes to all devices. Works over Wi-Fi (presumably not 3G), each photo stored 30 days, devices store last 1,000, Mac/PC stores all. Last item: iTunes in the Cloud. So much syncing to do with devices in the past. Any song you’ve already bought now has purchased button, so you can see entire purchase history. Any album or song bought in iTunes can be redownloaded to all devices with a cloud download button. No charge for downloading. Future purchases can be auto-pushed to new devices on a per-device basis. Eddy Cue back for a demo. Songs previously purchased in iTunes can now be transferred to devices wirelessly, referencing a full list of songs, or just songs not already on the device. You can grab file, start playing right away. iTunes in the Cloud during purchase of new song opens new iPad music player. Albums are in thumbnail view, doesn’t look like iTunes any more. Go to iPhone, preview a song, and almost as soon as it’s bought, it’s on the iPad. That’s iTunes in the Cloud. Jobs is on stage again.

11:49 AM PT: Up to 10 devices authorized. All of these apps are iCloud. Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Backup, App Store, iBooks, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, iTunes in the Cloud. All free. So that’s iCloud - stores content, wirelessly syncs to all devices. How do you get it? People get 5GB of free storage. It comes with iOS 5. Type Apple ID and password, go through setup, and it works. The 5GB doesn’t include purchased music, apps, or books. BETA TODAY for developers. iOS 4.3 beta will include iCloud. iOS 5 will include final iCloud in the fall. One more thing… A small thing…

11:53 AM PT: iTunes in the Cloud is just for music, he notes. You may have music you’ve ripped yourself. You can deal with that via sync (wi-fi/cable). Or buy songs you missed on iTunes. Or.. iTunes Match Service. There are 18m songs in the Store. If they’re in the Store, we can match them with your songs in your library. Software can match them, with the same benefits as music purchased in iTunes. Only takes minutes. There’s no need to upload library to the cloud. The few songs that remain are uploaded. iTunes Match will upgrade to 256k AAC DRM-free. $24.99 per year. You can get all of your music in the cloud, upgraded, for $25 per year. Compare this against Amazin, Google. Uploads there take weeks. Web apps. No upgrades. Here, it’s minutes, iTunes, and lower price than Amazon ($50 to $200). Who knows about Google price.

11:57 AM PT: Apple’s serious about this. There’s the N. Carolina data center. It’s their “third” data center. Rather large, eco-friendly as can be, with modern technology. Tons of server racks. Ready for customers to start using it. So that’s it - time for WWDC to commence. Have a great week, thank you.

Comments

1

In the 11:16am post there is mention of “Smart Playlist sync from iTunes” ... does this mean (a) Live Updating on the i-device will finally be operable again, or (b) We’ll be able to create smart playlists on the i-device, or (c) None of the above?

Posted by rockmyplimsoul in East Amherst, NY, USA on June 6, 2011 at 8:32 PM (CDT)